What the Backlash To #MeToo Reveals About the Male Psyche

Besides the fact that it's fragile as fuck.

It's no surprise that a movement like #MeToo has garnered its share of detractors. And those detractors all seem to have one thing in common: they really really want men to be able to rape who they please.

The single biggest thread I've seen running through the criticisms of #MeToo is that it's punishing men for their sexuality, and punishing men for having a sex drive. And this honestly reveals something utterly horrifying about men and how they think; "rapist" is their sexuality. At least according to 1) themselves and 2) women they've brainwashed with the fear of getting raped.

Because that is the only thing that explains the conflation of punishing people who rape and abuse others with punishing men "for being men." The only way that makes any sense at all is if you think men raping people is the natural order of things. And if you think that, you only reinforce why #MeToo is both necessary and long overdue.

But that's always been the story of men. It's how men first seized the power they have. They took it out of others' hands through sexual violence, and have kept it out of others' hands by shifting the responsibility for preventing rape onto their victims. They hold onto power by being simultaneously brutal and infantile. Adult enough to rape, immature enough to not be responsible when they do it.

If you think this is nuts? Congratulations, you're a decent human being.

The backlash to #MeToo is rooted in exactly one thing, and that thing is the fear of being outed as someone who has committed sexual assault or abuse (or has shielded someone who has). And not even the fear of having done it, and thus irreparably harmed another person, but the fear of getting caught and exposed. The fear of consequences.

Because that is the only thing that men in power have ever been afraid of. Consequences.

People who aren't drunk on power, when confronted with the fact they might have done a terrible thing, examine and self-reflect and soul-search and try to ensure they don't do the horrible thing again. Because they actually fear causing pain to others. People who wish to keep a grasp on their power instead lash out and try to discredit the accusations. Because they don't give a shit about hurting others. They just want to minimize potential consequences by making the victims harder to believe.

All of the articles and tweets and Facebook posts trying to discredit #MeToo? That is their goal. To avoid retribution for what they know they've done, or what they know they don't have a problem with. They want to flip the conversation to scare victims back into silence, so that they don't have to alter their behavior and give up the power they've enjoyed.

Because that's what consequences do. They erode power. And to people who have been steeped in their own power for their whole lives, losing any measure of it frightens them most of all.

This is why you see lament after increasingly ridiculous lament about consent "destroying spontaneity" or "ruining the mood." Because it's not even the person that these men are attracted to. It's the forceful seizure and exertion of power.

Sex is a sport to them. And when the other team lets you win, the game isn't fun anymore. They get aroused by the challenge of beating their opponent into submission. #MeToo is the opponent that will not submit, and who they forgot is at perfect groin-kneeing height.

Winter is coming. And they're scared to fucking death of it.

Your Minority Status Is Not a Get-Out-of-Being-a-Nazi-Free Card

Chelsea Manning is nobody's ally.

She is a trans woman, she's running for Senate as a Democrat, but that does not automatically make her part of the Resistance. She was, in fact, never on our side. And by "our" I mean "the United States, period." Not only is she a convicted traitor, but the entity she fed our cables to, WikiLeaks, is the very same one that later ratfucked the 2016 election.

Chelsea Manning should, by rights, be rotting in Leavenworth until middle age, but Obama is a better man than literally everyone and gave her an early release. Her idea of repayment? Running against a perfectly fine Democratic Senator and cozying up to white supremacists.

While most have rightly dragged her for it, there is an utterly infuriating trend among her supporters to rationalize her behavior in a variety of ways. From actually buying her ridiculous "gathering intel" excuse to making her out to be a victim of alt-right grooming tactics. It's both alarming and sad that the far-left is so enamored with her status as a trans woman that they refuse to call her out for being in league with neo-Nazis.

The two are not mutually exclusive. It's possible to be both part of a marginalized group and a horrible fucking person.

It certainly worked for Ernst Röhm, who managed to be both gay and Hitler's BFF and seemed particularly okay with slaughtering 10,000 gay men in the death camps alongside the Jews and Romani. In fact? It's shockingly common for gay white men to take up the cause of fascism and genocide.

It's the most basic response to a loss of power; the drive to reclaim it in other ways. Often horrible ones. It's like when the kid who gets slapped around by his dad for being "homo" finds out it feels really good to slap around the brown kids at school for being brown. And when you're denied power in every other way, discovering a source of it you can easily exploit is a hell of a drug.

So it's not a surprise at all that Chelsea Manning, who would have grown up steeped in white male privilege before figuring out she was trans, and who ultimately lost that privilege when she decided to betray both her country and her uniform, would seek to regain power any way she could. Being white is all she's really got, so who better to join forces with than Prosobiec and Cernovich?

The LGBT community doesn't have to protect her, nor should it. She has new friends now. And they hate all of you.

The Germans have a word for people like Chelsea. Who joined the Nazi Party not necessarily because they hated Jews, but because they desperately wanted to feel like they had control of something in their lives for once. That word is...

...Nazis.